# Melanie Goodman

Melanie Goodman is a LinkedIn consultant who helps professionals and businesses use profiles and content to build visibility and attract clients.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/melanie-goodman/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melaniegoodman-training-marketing-employeeadvocacy
- Topics: content-marketing
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Useful for helping professional services firms link LinkedIn visibility and fee conversations to business outcomes.

- Best for: Professional services firms wanting consultant visibility and better fee and payment conversations on LinkedIn.
- Not for: Consumer brands or paid creator sponsorship campaigns, especially short-form video for younger buyers.
- Check first: Ask for client references and verify audience demographics before committing budget.

### Takeaways

- Steady repeatable posts can matter more than a handful of viral hits.
- LinkedIn profile writing is where fee conversations start.
- Lead magnets need acquisition layers, not just a download button.

## Main ideas

- **Viral posts are not a strategy; the repeatable middle is**: Melanie Goodman analyzed 987 posts over a 365-day period and separated viral posts from what they call the "boring middle." Thirty-four viral posts, 3.4% of the total, generated 47% of impressions but often little action: a birthday post with the second-highest impressions produced zero recorded profile views. By contrast, 590 posts—60% of everything published—landed between 3,000 and 20,000 impressions each and together produced 46.6% of total impressions. They argue the middle is not a consolation prize but the result, because it is repeatable and can be studied.
- **Choose formats and opening lines for repeatable attention**: Melanie Goodman found image posts were both the most-used format and among the strongest performers, and the only format that reliably drove measurable profile views (8.6 per post on average). Video and document/carousel posts also outperformed plain text and polls. Opening lines mattered: posts starting with a specific number or statistic averaged 6,804 impressions, nearly three times the 2,345 average for question openings. Personal "I" statement openings were the second-strongest hook at 5,333 average impressions.
- **A LinkedIn profile is where fee conversations start**: Melanie Goodman reports reviewing hundreds of LinkedIn profiles and argues most describe what the person does all day rather than what is different for the client afterwards. That gap becomes a fee problem: undercharging, quoting low so the client says yes, and over-servicing until the fee no longer covers the work. They frame the profile as a low-stakes place to practise saying what your work is worth before a real negotiation.
- **Getting paid up front should be a standard business habit**: In a guest piece hosted on Melanie Goodman's Substack, Vanessa Ugatti argues that professionals often love their craft but avoid the money conversation, and that getting money on account should become standard practice. The piece lists the costs of billing after delivery—lost money, poor cash flow, debt, write-offs, wasted time, and stress—and the benefits of upfront payment: reliable income, better cash flow, reduced debt, more professional standing, and better clients. It also notes that staff may resist the change.
- **Lead magnets need acquisition layers, not just a download button**: Melanie Goodman argues most lead magnets do nothing because a guide sitting on a website with a download button is only step one. Clients come from five layers wrapped around the asset; miss them and the PDF is forgotten by Thursday. The newsletter promises concrete steps for each layer so a business implements a system rather than owning one standalone asset.
- **Presentation is part of the product, not a cost beside it**: Melanie Goodman argues that prospects read visual signals before they read written claims, so cheap presentation costs more over time than it saves upfront. The argument is built from a personal spending decision: a brand shoot booked in the first year when the business account held a fraction of the £3,000 cost, against the sensible instinct to wait and build a buffer.

## Work to read

- [LinkedIn impressions: the boring middle that built the account](https://melaniegoodmanlinkedinconsultant.substack.com/p/3-2m-linkedin-impressions-5-post-formats)
- [Why LinkedIn profile writing is where fee conversations start](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melaniegoodman-training-marketing-employeeadvocacy_by-next-week-youre-going-to-pay-me-double-activity-7500601773276090368-fV2J)
- [Guest piece: making upfront payment standard practice](https://melaniegoodmanlinkedinconsultant.substack.com/p/get-paid-upfront-the-habit-that-protects)
- [Most lead magnets do nothing: five layers that make them work](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melaniegoodman-training-marketing-employeeadvocacy_linkedinstrategy-businessdevelopment-contentmarketing-activity-7488851002054299649-PJyd)
- [The brand shoot that changed enquiry quality](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melaniegoodman-training-marketing-employeeadvocacy_who-said-appearances-dont-matter-i-spent-activity-7497899426020012032-SdKk)

## Brand relationships

- **Vanessa Ugatti** (mention)

## Partnerships

Melanie Goodman's LinkedIn posts and newsletter pieces show no sponsorship, ambassador, or paid-partnership format. They document her own commercial offers—a consulting practice and a free-subscribe newsletter that delivers a 60-page LinkedIn Success Workbook—and one guest-essay slot: a September 2026 newsletter issue gives the main piece to consultant Vanessa Ugatti, writing about getting paid up front for professional services. Goodman says they were not paid to mention Ugatti's book and do not endorse anything they do not mean. Before planning a spend, ask for rates and sponsorship tiers, disclosure and approval terms, and a partnership inquiry route. Treat outreach as an unlisted arrangement to negotiate directly, and confirm scope, deliverables, disclosure wording, and lead times in writing.

## Alternatives

- Tim S Dodd: When the firm wants outbound pipeline rather than a publishing programme. The posts argue that a buyer lands on a person's content, clicks the name, scrolls the profile and forms an opinion before any contact happens. Companies getting the best results, they say, build personal presence for sales and marketing staff alongside a company page. That suits a practice whose partners or business-development staff work named prospect lists and need warm approaches, or one that wants a managed outreach operation: the posts describe 11 years of client acquisition work and a LinkedIn outreach service built on it, emphasizing humanising approaches so prospects are warm by the time a call happens.
- Ibtehaj Ahmed: When the consultants' profiles look interchangeable and presentation is the first fix. The posts treat the profile banner as the most-seen piece of real estate a person owns, offer a copy formula—who you help, what you do, why they should care, how to act—and report before-and-after results after replacing generic templates, including a 280% rise in profile views over three weeks and 19 inbound messages for one client. This is the fastest, cheapest slice of the visibility goal and can run before any publishing cadence starts.
- Vanessa Ugatti: When the firm's priority is fee-setting and collection rather than visibility. The money-on-account method published on Melanie Goodman's newsletter is credited to Vanessa Ugatti. It covers the risks of billing after delivery, how to answer standard objections, why money on account must be topped up during a project rather than taken only at the start, and why staff resistance is a predictable obstacle when a firm changes policy. Melanie credits the book How to Get Paid Your True Worth and describes Vanessa Ugatti as working with lawyers and professional services firms on the psychology of charging, so the fee half of the firm's needs traces back to this material.
- John Soriano: When the campaign becomes paid short-form video for a consumer brand rather than a professional-services LinkedIn programme. The posts offer a cheap diagnostic for ads that appear to have stopped working: check hook rate, hold rate, click-through and conversion in turn, and judge each against the account's own average. They also provide a re-edit list that turns one raw UGC clip into five testable openers without a reshoot. That's the practical alternative if the firm ever runs comparable work for a DTC or ecommerce client.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/